


Only Blue or Black Days, Honey

by theprophetlemonade



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Angst, Gen, Implied JeanKasa, M/M, Mentions of Chronic Sickness, Mentions of Death, Recreational Drug Use, Referenced Mental Illness, Reincarnation, Third Person POV, background springles, canon references, implied alcoholism, pain and suffering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-28
Updated: 2015-07-28
Packaged: 2018-04-11 19:16:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4448912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theprophetlemonade/pseuds/theprophetlemonade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a curse to remember, but it's torture to be the only one who does.</p><p>One day, Jean wakes up, and it isn’t normal. It, his breathing, the universe, the way the world spins when he plants both feet on the floor and tries to haul himself out of bed. It’s the same feeling as being at sea for a long time and forgetting what it means to walk on land. Everything seems to sway, as if he can still feel the ebb and flow of waves beneath his feet, even though he has never seen the ocean in his life. </p><p>He remembers a different time, a different place, different people, and a different boy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only Blue or Black Days, Honey

**Author's Note:**

> "There's an art to life's distractions,  
> To somehow escape the burning weight, the art of scraping through,  
> Some like to imagine,  
> The dark caress of someone else, I guess any thrill will do."  
> \-- "Someone New", Hozier
> 
> I've been incubating this idea for a long time ... I am a big fan of reincarnation AUs for my poor, tortured Shingekis. I was inspired to finally get off my butt and put the idea I've been sitting on into words two nights ago, when Riema said something on Twitter about reincarnated Jean being afraid of fire. So kudos for the kick I needed to stop stalling on this fic!
> 
> Apologies for the pain. There's an awful lot of the wistful kind. Also apologies for the fact I haven't really proofed this yet, so if there are any typos, please bare with me. I'll fix 'em up soon.
> 
> Your comments are always welcome, and my Tumblr inbox is always open too!

One day, Jean wakes up, and it isn’t normal. _It_ , his breathing, the universe, the way the world spins when he plants both feet on the floor and tries to haul himself out of bed. It’s the same feeling as being at sea for a long time and forgetting what it means to walk on land. Everything seems to sway, as if he can still feel the ebb and flow of waves beneath his feet, even though he has never seen the ocean in his life.

And yet, it’s more than that. It’s more than just the feeling of water between his toes and knocking him back and forth with every step – the feeling saturates itself into every pore. Making his coffee doesn’t seem right. The crackle of static on his television is too loud. The water in his shower is too hot, even though he has never touched the dial in months, not after finding the optimum temperature.

He feels off-kilter.

And it’s not like a hangover. He knows hangovers – he’s had his fair share of them, of course. But hangovers parade themselves as stuffy headaches and queasiness in the stomach, and really, Jean feels neither of those things. He just feels wrong.

(And he hasn’t drunk in weeks, so he _knows_ it’s not a hangover.)

He blames it on the coattails of the dream he tries to scrabble for, figments zipping in and out of his head every time he moves too quickly or looks too long at the glare of the light in his kitchen. He hates that feeling – having a dream exist on the tip of his tongue. He knows he dreamt it, and he can almost taste what it was, but it exists just fractionally – and frustratingly – beyond his reach.

He knows he dreamt of walls. Castles, maybe. Of great forests and sprawling plains. Horses. There were definitely horses.

And death.

That’s a feeling that he can’t shake, and whilst he can’t recall to mind the how or what or why, it’s the only tail his can pin to the reason why his internal metronome seems to have skipped a count without telling him in advance.

He tries to drown the feeling in his gut with jet-fuel coffee, so black it could almost be a void that exists inside his _Best Dad_ mug – he’s not a dad, but when you’re a student, you take what crockery you can get – abyssal and swirling and so bitter he can taste the scald on the back of his throat before he even brings the steaming coffee to his lips.

It doesn’t work as he might have hoped, but at least the caffeine gives him buzz enough to push the seasick feeling to the very tips of his toes, hiding it away in his moth-eaten socks and the shoes he toes on clumsily as he’s jostling out the front door, late as always for his first class, dreams and uneasy feelings be damned.

 

* * *

 

Jean knows something is wrong when he slides into the back row of his _Introduction of Politics_ seminar, and the girl next to him flashes him a smile – eager and toothy as she unwraps a bacon sarnie on the desk, the greasy paper leaving dark splodges on her notes.

He doesn’t know her – not her name, not her face, not if this is the first time he’s seen her in this class – but suddenly, he’s _crying_.

He doesn’t realise it at first, taking his folders from his bag and spreading his papers flat on the desk as the professor begins scratching at the blackboard, and he’s scrawled at least three lines in his notepad when a droplet of water rolls from his chin and splatters onto the page.

Jean’s first instinct is to look up, staring at the ceiling and searching for a leak – but then he feels the wetness on his face, and his fingers are quickly probing at his eyes.

It’s not ugly crying – no sobs, no hitches in his voice, no snotty, disgusting snivelling – but the tears are rolling freely down his face, and he doesn’t know why. He wipes frantically at the skin beneath his eyes, smearing the salt water across his cheekbones, and he feels that same nausea from this morning rear its head and bray loudly at him – there’s a bludgeoning tightness in his chest.

Someone touches his elbow, but he barely feels it; he only turns when the girl beside him leans into his field of view, a concerned frown pinching together her messy eyebrows. She has a tissue in his hand, and she holds it out to Jean.

“Hey, you need a tissue?” she says, her chestnut-brown fringe sweeping fluidly across her forehead as she tilts her head in concern. “You don’t look so good.”

“I don’t know why I’m crying,” Jean says, and it’s as if the words are pulled from his chest without his authority, because his usual response to strangers is a grunt or a grumble. He takes the tissue from the girl’s hand nonetheless, patting it against his weeping eyes.

“It’s okay, politics can be pretty soul destroying. I understand,” she says, returning her attention to peeling the greasy paper from her breakfast. “I’m Sasha, by the way.”

 _I’m Jean_ , Jean wants to offer in return, but the moment her name leaves her lips, Jean’s chest twinges. And it’s painful.

 

* * *

 

Four days later, Jean wakes with the same taste in his mouth: of dreams and of death, but with one crucial difference: the fragments of the dream have been cut larger, and he remembers more. He remembers Sasha’s face beneath the walls. He wonders what that’s supposed to mean, if it means anything bar his psyche playing games with him.

Still, he’s not a fan of the deep-rooted nausea. He hasn’t been able to shake it yet, and he’s considering visiting the doctor if it prevails much longer.

 

* * *

 

It’s a week later when he sees Sasha again – the same seminar, and the same running-late as before – but he’s thankful that he doesn’t burst into tears this time. He slips into the back row after the professor has already started talking, dragging his books from his bag and throwing them onto the desk – throwing them, this time, because he’s feeling the drain of his disturbed sleep, and it’s made him cranky, and _loud_.

Sasha is eating an egg muffin this time; Jean notices the smell before he actually cares to glance up to see who his neighbour is. She’s staring right back at him, her lips clamped over the edge of the bun, but her eyebrows pulled up and the corners of her lips betraying a smirk. She chows down on the muffin in the most inelegant fashion, all obnoxious chewing and swallowing sloppily, and speaks to Jean with her mouthful.

“You don’t need a tissue this time, huh?” she garbles; Jean tries to pretend he doesn’t see the spray of saliva that lands on her notes.

 

* * *

 

Two weeks, four run-ins with the girl called Sasha later, and no escape from the dreams and the nausea, later, Jean gives in and books himself an appointment with the campus doctor.

He trawls Web M.D. before he goes, of course, and it tells him exactly all the things that he doesn’t want to know: _he’s got encephalitis, he’s got a brain tumour, he’s going to die._ He’s pretty sure it’s just exhaustion – caused by staying up too late and watching too many bad action movies at three in the morning when he should be sleeping – but he’d prefer a second opinion. And a second opinion from someone actually with a doctorate. He slams the lid on his laptop and grabs his coat with a huff.

The wait at the doctor’s office is long – or so Jean assumes, because this is the first time he’s made use of the campus’ facility, and maybe this wait time is normal here. He hopes that he has a handsome doctor – man or woman, he doesn’t mind so much, because anyone can be better than the old croon he had as his GP when he lived with his parents – and he kills his time coming up with medical pick-up lines that make him chuckle.

A young woman comes into the waiting room: blue scrubs, with a watch pinned to her breast pocket, and a strawberry-blonde bob tucked carefully behind her dainty ears. Jean meets her eyes, and his chest pinches. It’s not the same as with Sasha, but it’s almost— _almost_.

The nurse calls his name, and so he follows – even if he drags his feet and dawdles, staring hard at the carpet and wondering why that feeling of waves beneath his feet pervades when the pattern on the floor is in fact geometric, and not swirly.

She shows him to a door – upon which a placard reads: Dr. E. Smith – and abandons him with a smile. The one Jean returns is wobbly, but _he’s sick_ , so it’s allowed to be, he tells himself resolutely. He tries the door and wanders in.

The doctor has his back to him, but the man is tall, statuesque, and blonde, and his hair is partner with military precision to the side. Jean coughs lightly into his fist to attract the man’s attention – but when the doctor turns, whipping a latex glove from his hand casually, the cough in Jean’s throat all but chokes him.

“Hello,” the doctor says courtly, flashing a professional smile. “Who do we have here?”

The word that leaves Jean’s lips is not his own, and he knows not where it comes from. But it is the only thing that exists in his head in that lightning moment.

“ _Commander_.”

 

* * *

 

Jean is _positive_ that the doctor doesn’t stop in eyeing him sceptically all throughout the appointment, even if his questions are polite and courteous, and Jean manages to stuff the word spoken back into his throat in the fastest back-peddling of his short life.

He doesn’t know why he said it – a feeling he seems to share with the doctor as he scribbles notes on his clipboard as Jean describes his symptoms – and he can feel his mind spiralling as he claws more and more into what it might mean. _Commander_. Jean knows very little of the military, and he’s not a fan of those war-simulation video games that everyone else his age divulges time into.

“And are you feeling this nausea now?” the doctor asks, catching Jean by the threads of his conflicted daydream.

“Huh— what?”

“The symptoms,” the doctor repeats sternly, “Are they present now?”

Jean opens his mouth to say _no_ , but he stops. His fingers brush his face and come away dry, but when he rests his hand on his stomach, he feels the churning waters of a sea within him. It’s the same feeling.

 

* * *

 

The doctor is of no help to Jean, advising him to take paracetamol if there is any pain – _but there’s not_ – and to come back if the feeling persists much longer – _which it will._

Jean curls up on his couch that night in a bundle of the sheets and duvets stripped from his bed, and falls asleep to Netflix in the background. He dreams the same dream.

Walls. Trees. Horses. Giants. That’s a new one.

Sasha is there again. And so is the doctor, and the nurse too, her strawberry blonde hair mused and wind-swept, and no longer neatly kept.

There are other faces, other people. People Jean doesn’t recognise in the moment when he wakes in a cold sweat at three in the morning, and whose likenesses fade all too quickly from his conscious, leaving him scrabbling for shards again. He only remembers details: a red scarf, eyes like emeralds, freckles. He strains himself to remember more, but it only gives him a migraine.

He downs a pair of sleeping pills with a glass of water, hoping not to wake again before his alarm goes off for his morning lecture, and he doesn’t dream.

 

* * *

 

Jean seems to see Sasha everywhere once he’s aware of her presence. She turns up in his lectures, quietly stuffing her face with snacks at the back of the hall; she sits two tables across from him in his favourite café haunt on campus; she’s behind him in the queue at the library when he’s checking out the textbook he didn’t buy for his politics course.

“Y’know, I’d think you were stalking me,” she says one day – and this time, they’ve run into each other in the doorways of a Starbucks. Her grin is playful as she folds her arms over her chest, and her red-brown hair is scraped up into a messy ponytail. It seems familiar.

“As if,” Jean scoffs, holding the door for her as they both duck into the coffee shop, “I’ve never seen you in any of our classes before, but now suddenly, you’re everywhere. You’re the one stalking me.”

“Maybe it’s destiny,” Sasha grins, jostling him with her shoulder as she cuts in front of him in the line, in a manner that seems too familiar for someone she doesn’t know – and yet, she’s not phased, poking her tongue out between her lips and Jean scowls. “You snooze, you lose.” 

Jean orders his usual: a regular Americano without any of the fancy trimmings which they overcharge for, and he blows on the scalding liquid tentatively as he stands with Sasha, watching as her two orders of caramel macchiato are spruced up with fountains of whipped cream.

“Why two?” he asks as Sasha greedily accepts both drinks from the barista, “You’re not gonna drink both, are you?”

“Would you be surprised if I did?” Sasha teases, nudging Jean towards a booth in the corner. “I’m just kidding. One’s for the boyfriend. He’s supposed to be meeting me here.”

Sasha’s boyfriend is late – but she insists that it’s characteristic of him, and she’s never known him to be on time for anything. Jean remarks that she’s made up the entire persona as a means of _not_ coming off as a creepy stalker who appears everywhere he goes; Sasha slurps diligently on her coffee, frowning at Jean over her moustache of cream.

Jean can’t help the brazen laugh that is dry in his throat. He’s never usually so open, but maybe his sickness is making him woozy – or maybe Sasha is really just that much of an idiot that he can’t help but laugh at her expense.

He’s about to point it out to her – the cream that sticks to her upper lip – but she flies up in her seat, near giving Jean a statutory heart attack, and waves her arms around like a mad woman, almost spilling her coffee over the table top.

“Connie, Connie!” she hollers, deafening Jean and probably everyone around them who turns to glare, “Con, hey! Over here!”

Jean turns in his seat, casting a casual glance over his shoulder to appraise this not-so-imaginary boyfriend: short in stature, close-shaven hair, sun-tanned skin illustrated with sleeves of colourful tattoos, and—

Jean freezes. He knows this person. He knows this man. He swears—

Sasha pecks her boyfriend on either cheek and then scoots up on the bench to allow him to slide in next to her. She pushes his drink in front of him, already a gabble of happy chatter, and he slings is arm around her shoulder, and Jean cannot stop staring.

“Jean?” Sasha says sceptically, “You alright? You’re not … about to start _crying_ again, are you?”

“Oh, this is _that_ guy?” the boyfriend – Connie, as he was called – pipes up, eyeing Jean curiously, “What’s up pal, you never seen a kid with a shaved head before? Maybe you should consider it, given that dye job and all—”

Sasha silences him with a thump to his ribs that makes him squawk – but it’s enough for Jean to feel like he’s been swatted as well. He blinks rapidly, snapping his stare to the table top as he remembers where he is.

“S-shit, sorry,” he mumbles, “I just … I thought we met before or something.”

“Just got one of those faces,” Connie grins, a lop-sided sort of smirk twisting his thin lips. “My ma always told me I had a face for television, y’know. One everyone would remember.”

“Because you’re butt ugly?” Sasha quips, and mock horror eclipses Connie’s expression with comedic timing. She cackles wickedly, before planting a smacker on his lips. “It’s okay, pookie. Jean has a habit of making weird first impressions.”

Jean has to laugh bitterly at his own expense, but he knows that he is not wrong. He has seen Connie’s face before. He knows it. He _swears_ it.

 

* * *

 

Connie is a theatre major, and in all the time that Jean grills him unsparingly about his schedule and his life since practically _leaving the womb_ , not once can he find a point at which their lives might have overlapped.

Sasha suggests that they’ve probably seen each other around campus before, or passed each other in the street, but Jean knows it must be more than that. Connie has no distinct features, nothing to make him stand out from the crowd – and yet his face seems so _ingrained_ in Jean’s subconscious.

Connie humours Jean at least, answering all his questions with a crass laugh and often a jibe in Sasha’s direction – and when the pair of them announce that they have to leave for some reason or another, Connie thumps Jean on the arm and tells him: _you’re a cool guy, Jean. Let’s hang out again._

 

* * *

 

Sure enough, when Jean dreams that night, Connie is amongst the band of increasingly familiar faces – and yet there is no feeling that he has sprung out of nowhere. He feels in place, and it’s more as if the film stretched across his face has been lifted, and he has stepped out of the backgrounds, and Jean is just now more _aware_ of him there.

When he wakes, barely able to right himself against the headboard of his bed with the seasickness-that-isn’t-seasickness, Jean wonders if the reason he thought he knew Connie was because he has seen him in his dream before.

The thought seems ridiculous, and he shakes his head to clear himself of what can – and _must_ – only be science fiction; but there’s a small, wriggling part of himself that remains terrified of the idea.

 

* * *

 

The feeling doesn’t disapparate – but it comes and goes in waves like the flux of a tide. Sometimes Jean feels its depths: usually early in the morning when he drags himself from the furrows of a dream, or whenever he sees Connie and Sasha around campus. Sometimes he feels its shallows, like the white foam crest of a wave lathing across the sand with nowhere to go.

But it doesn’t leave. For every wave that recedes, another flushes across the shoreline, never quite making the headway of a high tide and the waterline remaining stagnant in the same place, unshiftable and unmovable.

Jean wishes he could get used to it. It’s been near a month now since this twisting in his gut and clenching in his chest began, but he can never quite ignore it. It’s like being off-balance, constantly wobbling on one leg and having to throw his hands out to catch himself every time he tips over too far. He can’t go long periods without needing to sit down; he can’t forget. He doesn’t sleep well, and even when he does, the same images plague him, and he feels that when he wakes, he’s always exerted, always exhausted, and his legs and arms too often feel like he’s been running – or climbing, or jumping, or clenching things in is fists.

He doesn’t go back to the doctor – even though he sees the practice’s umber scrawled into his day planner every time he opens its cover – because he still hasn’t lived down his expulsion from last time. He tries to smother the feeling with sleeping pills, with cocodamol to make him numb, with the weed he keeps stuffed under his mattress. It works a little bit, but it affects his focus. His ability to concentrate on his lectures and his essays stumbles.

 

* * *

 

Even with the nausea, at least Jean can say that Connie is a good guy. Obnoxious at times, yes, and incredibly loud – but _good_. He has a certain magnetism about him, and it make Jean feel like he has known him all his life, even in the space of just a few weeks.

Jean’s never had many friends. He’s always kept to himself, more interested in his books and his study, and never quite on the same page as the people he has been pushed into conversation with. He always feels like there’s something missing – the knot in the thread that he feels he needs for it to work and for it to be _genuine_. Nobody’s ever quite clicked for him.

Connie and Sasha do. They’re electric. Jean speaks, Jean grumbles, Jean _laughs_ when he’s with them – and maybe the camaraderie would scare him if he weren’t so damn _tired_ lately. He knows it’s not like him to be so friendly and so willing, but he’s not exactly been feeling like himself – whoever that is – for a long time now, so maybe it’s actually for the best?

Jean feels less lonely. There have always been people around him: family, teachers, everyone in this bustling city he calls home – but there’s an empty space in his heart that he’s only just acknowledged, save now it has begun to fill up with a trickle down, and each drip echoes hollowly in the space he wasn’t aware of until he heard its sound.

 

* * *

 

It happens again about two months after meeting Sasha. He’s picking up some groceries on the way home from campus, and he’s juggling two paper bags in one arm, trying not to scatter his vegetables all over the sidewalk, when he opens the door of the convenience store into the face of a young woman. She has a red scarf wrapped around her neck – even though it’s erring on too warm for that sort of outerwear – and she has cropped, jet-black hair, framing her delicate face.

Jean starts crying.

He’s seen that red scarf before. He knows it, God damn it – he _knows_ he’s seen it before.

Her name is Mikasa, she tells him as she takes his grocery bags from his arms and leads him to the side of the street, a consoling hand rubbing up and down his shoulder as he grinds his palms into the hollows of his eyes. He sniffs pitifully for every time she asks him sympathetically if he’s alright, and if he needs her to call someone to pick him up – and all he can muster from his lips is a pathetic: “I know you.”

If she hears, she ignores it, letting his tearful ramblings drip from her shoulders inconsequentially. She continues to sooth him with the palm of her hand, and offers to walk Jean home if he needs it.

Jean feels awful. Not awful in the sense that he wants to cry – the truth is: he doesn’t want to cry. He doesn’t feel like crying. There’s no ugly swelling in his chest, no pain in his heart or in his head, no constriction of his airways. No symptoms of wanting or needing to cry – and yet the tears keep on spilling, and it scares him not to know _why_.

Mikasa walks him home, helps him stock his falling-apart fridge with his groceries, and then leaves her number scrawled on an envelope on the kitchen table, telling him to call her if he needs someone who can listen. She says she’s good at listening.

Jean wonders if she’d be willing to listen to him if he told her that he dreamt of her before he met her. It just sounds crazy.

 

* * *

 

The following Friday, it’s not sadness that is meant to weigh down his chest, but anger.

Jean is at the movies with Connie and Sasha – in the queue for popcorn and soda, at Sasha’s insistence – and where there would be tears, it’s Jean’s fists that suddenly clench, and his teeth that grit, and he feels the symptoms of conflicted anger, but does not feel the hatred in his heart himself – like there’s the space in his chest for the emotion to be, and his nerves are still reacting to it as if it were there to frazzle, but he himself is void.

There are two men standing in front of them in the queue: a burly blonde, with rippling biceps like tree trunks, and a tall, lanky, Great Dane-of-a-man, and Jean knows it’s _them_ – he feels anger towards them that he cannot describe – and the nausea surges like a tidal wave, buffeting him like a slap across the face. He tells Connie and Sasha that he needs to go to the bathroom, but the truth is that he needs to sit down before he might be blown over by the surge and the impact that he cushions in his stomach.

 

* * *

 

Tuesday. The blonde barista with eyes like blue ice at Starbucks doesn’t know why Jean cries when she asks with a deadpan for his order. Jean insists that it’s hay fever; she barely raises an eyebrow. He’s sure that she’s used to weirder and to worse.

On Thursday, there’s a blonde man at the library – all skin and bones and far too short to reach the book on the top shelf that he wants. Jean almost goes to help, but when his eyes meet those pleading of the young man, he has to skirt around the bookcase and plaster himself against the wood, praying that the hard surface against his back will give him grounding.

The following Monday, and it’s a woman out jogging, who passes Jean on the street as he’s locking up his front door. Her dark hair is scraped back against her head, revealing dark sin speckled with sun-drenched freckles, creeping up into her hairline and down beneath the sports vest clinging to her gangly frame. She meets Jean’s eyes as she runs past, her arms pumping lazily and her sneakers bouncing on the sidewalk, and she shoots him a sardonic sort of grin. Jean feels water on his face.

It’s more than just _crying_. More than just anger, than fear, than the trickle down into his hollow chest. It’s the same feeling as falling in love with a stranger on the street, or in a café window, or on the opposite subway platform. It’s like two ends of a knotted string being reunited after snapping, knowing their ends once fit together, but now are too frayed to recombine.

It’s like knowing a soul-mate for the first time – except Jean lives with the expectation of meeting one around every street corner. There’s longing, a century-old connection that feels withered and worn and yet made of rock. There are so many things. Jean doesn’t know how to explain the way it pulls him in all different directions.

It’s like _realisation_.

They all reappear in his dreams, without question. Sometimes they’re a little different – like Mikasa’s hair is slightly longer, and she has a knife-like scar marring her porcelain cheek; and the running woman doesn’t wear her hair in a ponytail, but instead clipped back with a red-and-gold barrette – but their faces do not change.

Jean remembers moving images when he wakes. He remembers jackets – tan-brown with wings embroidered on the backs and the sleeves – he remembers features, he remembers words. He remembers names.

Levi. Historia. Eren. There are more. There is one that leaves the lips of his dreamself more often than the rest, but it escapes him. Things flitter in and out. Stars. Constellations. He sees freckles more and more often. He sees fire.

They are not names he knows.

He scribbles them down on post-it notes around his apartment, slapping them against the fridge door, to the lid of his laptop, to the underside of the peephole on his front door. He hopes it will make something become magically so much clearer. He hopes it will trigger something within him that might explain why – why, and _who_.

 

* * *

 

“Do you think Buddhists could be on to something with the whole reincarnation thing?”

Connie and Sasha both look up from their textbooks, pens hovering momentarily over their pages as they’re suspended from writing. Jean only presses the nib of his biro harder into his paper, and grits his teeth. He speaks again.

“Like, y’know – maybe that’s why sometimes you read those stories about people who remember things that didn’t happen to them, or— or _whatever_.”

“That doesn’t sound like politics to me,” Sasha quips playfully, tapping Jean’s open textbook with the end of her chewed pen. “Religious studies aren’t on the syllabus.”

“No, I mean— ‘s just a question,” Jean mumbles, “I, uh— saw something about it on the news this morning. About knowing someone before you’ve met them, y’know?”

“Sounds like something that Steven King would write a book about,” Connie muses, “And then it would get a Hollywood movie with five terrible sequels and possibly an animated series or a porno if we’re lucky.”

Jean’s face falls – he can’t hide it. He buries his eyes in the words on his page, trying to remember how to swallow them down and block out the world around him and the world within him – but Connie notices, and tries to back pedal clumsily.

“B-but, I mean … I guess it could be possible? Knowing someone’s face before seeing ‘em is kinda cool. And it’s not like anyone knows what happens when you die, so … anything is possible? Even reincarnation is that’s what floats your boat.”

“I bet you were a snail in a past life,” Sasha remarks with a sly grin, “Or a toad. Jean was definitely a horse. He’s got the face for it.”

Connie squawks loudly and Jean deflates, Sasha cackling madly until someone from one table over turns around and shushes them angrily, stage whispering that _this is a library and they should shut the fuck up_. Jean ducks his head shamefully, but it only makes Connie and Sasha giggle uncontrollably.

 

* * *

 

If Jean’s internet history is anything to go by, he should really be an expert in religious reincarnation by now. He’s drained Wikipedia, he’s been to the far reaches of the Google search, he’s watched far too many B-rate documentaries on dodgy torrent sites to still be so clueless.

He’s had _the feeling_ twice this week. The substitute teacher in his seminar – a Mr. Ackermann, as he had written meticulously on the blackboard – and a young woman from Connie’s theatre clash, who he had introduced as Christa, who had needed to borrow some notes. Jean had not recognised either name, but the faces – he knew the faces.

He had managed to asphyxiate the burn behind his eyes and the uncouth tears that had dribbled down his cheeks, smearing the feeling into the sleeve of his jacket and concealing it behind the tissue he blew his nose into.

If he’s remembering something – be it a repressed memory, or a past life, or just a muddled mashup of some action movie he watched years ago, combined with the faces of people he’s seen in passing on the street – he wants to know _why_. Why now? Jean reasons that four months of chronic sleep disorder doesn’t just spring from the woodwork without warning.

He dreams about fighting the giants – all of them, flying through the air on black and white wings with swords in their grasps. He dreams of the sound of grappling hooks meeting stone. He dreams of the feel of leather cutting into his skin. He dreams of the tastes of blood at the back of his throat as it paints the air in fountains.

It all feels so real – as if his muscles have memory and lungs know what it means to shout until hoarse.

The giants are called _titans_. The boy with green eyes disappears and reappears in puffs of white-hot smoke. Freckled hands are acquainted intimately with Jean’s shoulders.

Jean is deathly afraid of fire. Smoke. The smell of bodies roasting in the pyre.

There are mornings when Jean falls out of bed and has to stumble blindly for the toilet, retching up his guts into the basin with a pained heave of his spine and a whine that dies in his mouth. Burning fat makes the lips moist in a way that cannot be forgotten.

Say he _does_ believe in reincarnation – in past lives and past friends and uncovered memories – he reasons as his forehead is pressed against the cool porcelain of the toilet bowl, his bare shoulders shivering – why is he the only one? Why do the others not remember? Why is he the one who has to live this torment that is slowly chipping away at his health and his sanity?

It hurts, God damn it. It hurts so bad.

It feels like someone has reached into his ear and ripped out his cochlear – and his sense of balance is paying for it. He can barely stand up without his head spinning.

It feels like a hand has plunged into his abdomen and jimmied out one of his ribs, and now there’s a gaping, bleeding hole in the side of his stomach that weeps blood through every shirt he wears.

It feels like the hands he dreams leave scorch marks across his skin, as if the very freckled fingers are set alight and sear bubbling burns into his back, his chest, his shoulders, his _neck_ —

Jean doesn’t want this. He doesn’t want people to look at him and think he’s crazy when he starts to cry in the middle of the street at every other person and their dog. He doesn’t want Sasha to continue to joke if he needs a tissue, and he doesn’t want to keep relying on late night phone calls to Mikasa when he’s too afraid to fall asleep and learn more about what he’s supposedly forgotten.

He doesn’t want to remember. Not alone. _Not alone_.

 

* * *

 

It’s summer. Jean sweats more when he wakes in the morning, sun streaming into his face, the city beyond his window practically screaming, and his sheets tangled and drenched.

The heat does him no favours; his clothes always feel too sticky and too tight, and the glare of the sun too often burns his skin when he forgoes the sun cream – which is most days.

It’s been six months since he met Sasha, but it’s been three months since the last incident. He would feel thankful for it – because Connie and Sasha are good people, and Mikasa comes over for dinner every Thursday to check on him, and he managed to find the courage to get the name of the boy in the library he keeps seeing (Armin), and it turns out they have a lot in common – if it weren’t for the way the late night escapees don’t relent.

It’s almost as if his subconscious wants to make up for the fact Jean hasn’t cried in public in weeks, and the only remaining way to torture him enough is to make the dreams all the more vivid, and all the more violent.

Blood scatters the streets like discarded flower petals in the spring – wreathes of crimson where there should be dying flowers, and not dying bodies. The stench of death hangs in the air, putrid and acrid, and it scalds the back of Jean’s throat and the inside of his nose until it hurts to breathe.

It becomes difficult to distinguish between the way blood burns and the way decay burns and the way smoke _burns_.

Jean learns fear – true fear – and he learns how it turns his legs to ice, to steel, to lead, and he can no longer move them. He learns what his name sounds like screamed from the lungs of people he’s never spoken to, but knows the faces of like the backs of his hands. He learns the green-eyed boy is Eren, and of the way his fists feel balled up in his shirt when he screams into his face.

He dreams of a new face. Freckled, noble, _kind_. So kind.

He hasn’t seen it before, but he knows in an instant that the hands that trace his skin amidst the reels of blood and fraying guts belong to this same face.

The face is always followed by the pyre, without exception. The dreams begin to repeat themselves. The freckled face burns every night, and Jean wakes up with puffy eyes and wet cheeks more often than he would like to admit.

And yet, for the first time since his sickness started, he searches for a name for the freckled face, but finds none.

He slaps a cold flannel across his face, relishing in the way it soothes his face and seeps coolly into his pores, and wonders if the reason he doesn’t remember is because he never learned the name in the first place. But it feels too important – the face, the man, the way Jean comes to hear a voice whispering intimately in his ear when he sleeps – and Jean begins to think that there’s a reason the name is so hard to reach.

Maybe that’s why he’s dreaming. Maybe he’s meant to know. Maybe he forgot for a reason.

 

* * *

 

The semester ends with Jean barely scraping through his finals, the late nights of cramming doing no favours to his already deteriorating health and manic insomnia for all the times he forces himself awake.

Jean doesn’t like to be alone in the flat, because he always thinks too much, and thinking too much ends up with him scribbling names across post-it notes and sketching shoddy faces of the people in his dreams onto the backs of the bills he really needs to pay. He’s no artist – he can never quite get right the piercing glare of Eren’s eyes, or the way freckles dust the cheeks of the unnamed man.

Connie and Sasha are always glad to occupy his couch and his Netflix, spending many nights collapsed in a pile and a drunken stupor across the sofa cushions with the television still grumbling in the background. Jean complains – he has a reputation to maintain – but he doesn’t mean it, not really. He’s glad for them there. He wishes they could stay over more. Having them there – in front of him, loud and boisterous and entirely tangible – makes him feel a little less crazy.

Maybe it _is_ destiny. Maybe he was meant to find them again.

He introduces them to Mikasa with a blind sense of hope that it might trigger something – _anything_ – but he has no such luck. At least they like each other. Jean might even say there’s an instant sort of connection: with Mikasa’s reserved chuckles at their antics and Sasha’s unsparing awe at Mikasa’s impeccable fashion sense, and Connie’s marvel at how she can genuinely lift him off the ground with one bicep.

They get along like they’ve known each other for years. Jean begins to think that they have.

There’s one night in July where they’re all together, crammed around Jean’s ratty table in his galley of a kitchen, all the windows in the apartment thrown open to the car-exhaust flavoured summer night that shrouds the city thickly. They’ve had a few beers – or more than a few, judging by the pyramid of empty cans Connie is building, and the way all the playing cards scattered across the table top are saturated sticky – and Jean’s head buzzes with a different sort of giddiness. The beer coats him with a sweet sort of haze, a little gluey and a little gummy, but it’s a welcome change to the feeling of his head stuffed to the brim with cotton wool.

Mikasa laughs like a diamond, beer breath stale and sweet on her lips as she leans into Jean’s side, burying her face in his shoulder as Sasha draws a moustache in foam across Connie’s upper lip. Mikasa’s hair smells like coconut and perfume, and not ash and dirt and sweat, and it clouds Jean with a plethora of _what ifs_ and _could have beens_ and _in another life, maybe_. She’s a pretty girl. She’s smart, beautiful. He never would have complained.

Maybe if they hadn’t met in the way they did.

Mikasa’s phone buzzes on the table, vibrating the stained wood jarringly with the arrival of a text message. Her delicate fingers are clumsy as she scrambles for it, unlocking the screen with a few too many sweeps of her thumb.

“Oh,” she hums, “My roommate just got back from work. Jean, would you mind if he came over for a few drinks?”

Jean is sure he would nod to anything, his lips barely his own as he smiles, his hand barely his own as he waves on her suggestion. The more the merrier, he assumes. The less alone he is, the better.

Time is both slow and quick, simultaneously. Jean really had no grasp of it, for seconds and minutes become meaningless with the pulse of petty alcohol in his veins, and the longer he goes without looking at a clock, the further away he can push the thought of sleep. When the doorbell rings – a croaking trill that begs to cut out in a shrill choke – he doesn’t hear the sound, only feeling the cool space that Mikasa leaves when she hops to her feet and his arm falls from the back of her chair.

The boy she brings in – a boy, a man, someone on the cusp of everything like Jean – has green eyes like the sea: wild and turbulent and magnificent and _oh so familiar_. He wears a ratty t-shirt and jeans with holes in the knees and has a guitar case slung over one shoulder, and he greets them all with a bawdy grin and a casual “ _’sup_ ”, and Jean can’t help himself.

“ _Eren_.” It’s barely a breath. There’s something missing in those green eyes, and Jean is positive that he has whatever it is.

“Do you two know each other?” Mikasa says. Jean doesn’t know how to answer that. They’ve met. They haven’t. He knows Eren. Eren doesn’t know him.

Jean followed this boy into hell in another life. Things like that don’t lend themselves to be said crassly or casually.

“Yes,” Jean says quietly, “Yes, I think so.”

Eren frowns, letting his guitar slide from his shoulders as he drags a chair out from under the table, its wooden legs screeching on the kitchen linoleum.

“I don’t think so, bud,” he says, “I’m usually pretty good with faces, and I, uh— you’ve probably just had a lot to drink. We ain’t never met.”

But they have. Oh God, they have. Jean wants to scream, but he knows any noise in his throat is little more than garbled words and nonsense to their ears.

All of them have met before.

“Don’t worry about Jean,” Sasha pipes up gregariously, “First time I met him, he burst into tears at the sight of my face. Didn’t realise I was _that_ ugly.”

“He did the same to me,” Connie slurs drunkenly, “Said he knew my face before, like, we ever met. He smokes too much weed and it fucks with his head.”

“Well, I’m game for that,” Eren grins, plonking himself roughly into the chair and drawing one leg up to his chest. He rests his chin on his knee as he digs around in his pockets for a spliff. “Anyone got a light?”

Jean stares dumbly at the silver Zipper lighter that’s tossed across the table from Connie to Eren; it loops through the air in a grand arc, but shines like a bullet. Eren grins around the joint pressed between his lips, bobbing up and down as the corners of his lips are strung upwards.

He cups his hand around the end of the cigarette, his eyes heavy-lidden in a way that shadows his eyelashes upon his cheeks, and runs his thumb over the lighter – it doesn’t catch immediately, spluttering with a faint hiss before it vomits up a weak excuse for a flame.

The dance of orange and yellows and indigo blues cuts through jean’s drunken haze like a knife, leaving him lacerated and bleeding out with all the things he had drunk to clog up and forget. His veins rue the fire – it’s as if he can feel the blood that pulses so close to the surface on his wrist begin to incinerate, creeping up his forearms like the long fuse on a stack of dynamite and the suspense is much the same. He feels the heat of the flame, even though it’s impossible – he’s on the other side of the kitchen table, and the bright fire is all too transient as Eren caps the lighter with a click.

He inhales deeply on his cigarette, the glowing embers of the lit end like hot coals, singed black and weeping red heat. He sucks the smoke into his lungs, deep, deep down into where he has no holes to speak of like Jean, and then like white, ghostly fingers, the tendrils of smoke come seeping from his nostrils and from the crack between his lips.

The smell of marijuana is not like wood smoke: sweet and pungent, as if the colour moss-green could be smelt and tasted on the back of the tongue. Wood smoke is drier, more bitter, more laced with the brittleness of charcoal – but smoke is smoke, and still crackles on the back of Jean’s throat all the same.

He hacks into his closed fist, his cough rasping and the laughter of the others slating as they tease him for it.

It’s unlikely that Jean will ever smoke again.

 

* * *

 

Eren is just like the others: he remembers nothing. And that’s implying that there is something worth remembering at all – because maybe this Eren isn’t _that_ Eren, even if they share the same shaggy hair, and the same sea-green eyes, and the same raucous temperament, and the same—

No, it’s the same Eren. Jean cannot question that.

He is lucky that Eren doesn’t scare easily, and he’s lucky that the tether that is keeping all this inside himself is coming close to snapping. It allows questions to slip from beneath the lid of the trunk he’s stuffed all his secrets into, even if it now means he can’t blame the desperation in his voice on alcohol alone.

The others are too drunk to notice. Too drunk to hear the plea in Jean’s voice, and to be too alarmed when he reveals that he knows the names of Eren’s parents. Eren slurs his words as he asks Mikasa if she’s been _spilling the beans_ on him, but she shakes her head as Connie and Sasha dissolve into giggles, words thrown around like beach balls and balloons about how Jean has a penchant for knowing the creepy details.

They’re not creepy, or at least, not to Jean. He was told these things in confidence once before – a long, long time ago when they weren’t secrets, but instead dying words and confessions in the twilight, crammed around campfires with the smell of cleaning oil and horses, and the prayer that tonight may not be their last night. He believes it all now. It’s ingrained within his bones. Possibly deeper, because it spans years and years, maybe millennia, maybe universes.

The acceptance leads Jean no closer to the name of the man with freckles who ends up on the pyre every night. He can’t exactly ask the people around his kitchen table to name every person they know with freckles, in the mute hope that perhaps they’re all more intricately connected than Jean first thought, and it’s not just him who’s the key stone of it all.

He wouldn’t get a straight answer from any of them anyway.

 

* * *

 

Eight months since Sasha. The summer is dawdling now, waltzing coquettishly with the approaching autumn and the way it makes the city taste crisper and feel colder as wind whistles through the narrow streets. Jean is still sick, but he’s lasted two-hundred-and-forty-three days so far, so he can _keep_ lasting.

Marijuana no longer tastes good on his tongue, but at least beer still does. He spends a lot of late nights in the park half-way between his and Connie’s apartment, with Eren and his guitar. It turns out he’s quite good. Sasha and Mikasa both swoon with every cord.

Jean wonders if he could just tell them. He wonders if after the inevitable laughter, they might understand, and they might own up to the feeling shared of tangled threads stretching between each of their hearts that they’ve not quite been able to explain.

Do they believe in destiny? Jean never did, but he can’t deny the magnetic pull that has drawn him back to the very souls he once fought shoulder to shoulder alongside. He believes in any sort of fate these days. There’s no other way to explain the way his sea never quite manages to leave the shore.

“I think we’ve all met before,” he says. His chest burns, yet it’s up to him, and only him, to push through the throngs of fire. He curls his fists tightly into the grass they lay on, a haze of cigarette smoke, lazy music, and flickering city lights that like to pretend they’re electric, clockwork fireflies. He imagines wrapping his heart up within his fingers, squeezing it until he might absorb it into his skin, or it seeps through the gaps in his fingers as pulp. He imagines bringing it to his lips and tasting what his heart might taste like, but instead he just stares at the ground.

The others laugh, but it was expected.

“Are you high?” Connie cackles, “I thought you quit, dude.”

“’M not _high_ ,” Jean mutters, tugging at the tufts of grass clenched in his fingers. “’S just a feeling.”

Mikasa is more sympathetic.

“A feeling like what?” she asks. Jean has always been weak to the sincerity in her dark eyes.

“Like I knew you all before. Like … we were meant to meet again. Like we will meet again after all this. Like— like lots of stuff.”

“Sounds like shmuck,” Eren gripes, his grin teasing as he grinds his cigarette into the body of his guitar, singing the wood black. “You been watching _Cloud Atlas_ on Sky Movies again?”

“Shut up,” Jean grumbles. Mikasa dutifully slaps her roommate on the arm, but it earns nothing more from Eren than a sardonic sort of chuckle as he goes back to strumming his guitar.

“What was I like?” she asks, shuffling closer to Jean in the twilight-dark. She tips her head onto her shoulder and a curtain of her raven hair falls from behind her ear. “What was I like before?”

Jean swallows thickly.

“The same,” he murmurs, “Your, uh— hair was a little longer.” He mimes the cut of a bob that grazes his shoulder. “You had a scar on your cheek. You— you still had that scarf. The red one.”

Mikasa nods.

“Eren gave it to me.”

“I know,” Jean says softly, “He gave it to you them, too. That’s … that’s how I recognised you.”

He meets her eyes in the dark, a silent prayer upon his lips that she remembers the day they met at the grocery store in a different light now. He hasn’t before wanted her to remember the mess he made of himself with his tears – but now he longs for her to understand why they fell. He wants her to feel what he felt: the connection after going so long without realising he needed to make one. The feeling stronger than falling in love – like finding a piece of the soul lost or left behind long, long ago.

“What about me and Sash?” Connie interjects, his words a little rash and his eyes a little bleary. Jean is not sure if he thinks it’s a game. “What were we like in your past life?”

“Sasha’s parents were hunters,” Jean says slowly, “They taught her how to use a bow and arrow to catch … game.”

Sasha wiggles her eyebrows boastfully at Connie, their chuckling inebriated and giddy.

“And Connie … had a big family,” Jean continues, “The oldest of six or seven. His parents were really proud of him for joining the military—”

“A military man?” Connie squawks, slapping his knee, “How about that. Can’t say I’d ever write myself down as one o’ those, though. I ain’t got the dedication.”

“You’d probably walk into a bullet,” Sasha snorts, “Maybe that’s what you died. Walked in front of a sniper rifle.”

Connie and Sasha begin to argue, and it dissolves all too quickly into a playful tussle that has them both careening backwards into the grass, frantic fingers struggling to tickle underarms, and legs kicking and flailing wildly.

Jean sighs, blundering for his beer can nestled somewhere in the grass. He shouldn’t have expected any more than that.

He throws almost half the can down his throat, his stomach queasy and bloated for having drunk on no dinner. His appetite has been in and out lately – too often out as sensible meals times, and too often in when it’s three in the morning and he’s craving Doritos and soda by the gallon.

Connie and Sasha's tickling becomes insipid snuggling and the nuzzling of noses, which in turn becomes sloppy kisses with sound effects Jean would rather block out. Eren’s wrist grows tired and he stumbles over the quick-paced chords of some cicada tune; his strums become slower and it’s a twangy pavane that exists in the hollow body of his guitar and that floats in the unmoving, lethargic air. The song is melancholy with notes of wanderlust and the way the close-shaven grass feels bare feet and palms, and it tastes of sepia and old film and nostalgia.  

When Jean tells the others that he’s hungry – and is acknowledged with a poem of garbled grumbles and run-off words – it’s Mikasa who grabs him by the elbow as he’s enticed towards the beacon of the big, yellow _M_ that glows like a shrine and reeks to high heavens of salty fries and questionable chicken nuggets.

“You want me to get you something?” Jean murmurs. Mikasa shakes her head, hauling herself to her feet using Jean’s bicep as leverage.

“Yes. But I’ll walk with you.”

She links her arm with his and sets the pace, her strides ever graceful and purposeful. Jean doesn’t have to wait long for her to speak.

“How long has it been like this?” she asks quietly.

“Eight months, give or take,” Jean murmurs, “I just woke up one day and it was different. I was … different. Like being kicked in the teeth.”

“Have you thought about … seeing someone about it?” she hushes, “Like a therapist? It might help.”

“They’ll just tell me I’m crazy,” he mutters, glancing both ways as they come to the kerb, the blinding, artificial light of the open-all-night McDonald’s on the other side of the road beckoning them with the yellowness that pours through its glass doors. “Maybe I am. Who fucking knows.”

Mikasa doesn’t say anything further until they’re at the till and she pushes Jean’s hand away when he tries to pay for their food, telling him softly that his hamburger is on her tonight.

There’s something about the brimming night beyond the doors that makes the white light of the fast-food chain feeling more welcoming than it should – something artificially ethereal, almost too glaring to look at face on. The stench of grease and meat and salt slathers Jean’s skin, his stomach growling as Mikasa plonks his order into his welcome hands, still hot through the paper bag.

She gets herself a Coke, slurping on the straw pressed between her red lips as they navigate the road once more, Jean offering her fries from his bag as they hop up onto the sidewalk and meander back through the park. Eren’s guitar still twangs in the evening twilight, resonating at a higher drawl than the fog horn of car exhausts and distant police sirens that haunt the rest of the city.

“What were you like?” she asks, before they reach the sprawl of the others again. “Before? Were you different?”

“I still had the same haircut, if that’s what you’re asking,” Jean admits dryly. Mikasa rolls her eyes and slurps her drink loudly. “I think I was braver. Angrier. Still a cynical bastard, I guess. I, uh— I think I had a crush on you.”

“You had a crush on me? And you’re telling me that this is not some elaborate ruse to come onto me?” Mikasa admonishes, her thin eyebrows quirking upwards in fine arcs. “What about now?”

“N-not now,” Jean mumbles, digging his toes into the ground as they walk. “Not like this. I think— I think there was someone else. A b-boy, maybe.”

“You don’t know his name?”

“No. No, not like— not like the way I knew Eren’s name. Only his face,” he says, slowing his paces until he stops. Mikasa walks a few feet ahead until she realises Jean is no longer at her side. She turns, the straw of her soda inches from her lips, and concern in her eyes.

“Do you … do you believe me?” Jean asks, his voice quiet. The way Mikasa presses her lips together in a tight line doesn’t do anything to appease his sickness.

“You don’t want me to answer that, Jean,” she says gently, “It won’t make you feel better.”

Jean is alone.

 

* * *

 

He dreams that night – like any other night – after he drags himself back to his empty apartment, having abandoned Mikasa and Eren at the taxi rank and waved Connie and Sasha home. He collapses into bed with two sleeping pills tossed to the back of his throat, in the stupid hope that he might sleep so deeply that he will not go there, that he will not have to relive the story as he knows it.

Homes that aren’t home. Friends. Hope. Freckled hands exploring every inch of skin beneath brown jackets and leather straps. Shouting. _Titans have breached the wall._ Smoke and ash and Eren burning. The city in rubble and on fire.

_“Jean! Calm down!”_

There’s blood on the roads, in the cobbles of the streets where it seeps between the gaps in the bricks. It will soak through to the earth, and maybe deeper.

Blood on Jean’s hands. A white mask tied across his face.

And then the pyre. Always, and without fail. And that’s where it usually ends, with Jean waking up in a sweat flavoured with smoke and concrete debris.

Not this time. This night is different.

The pyre burns with the body laid to rest amidst wood smoke and timber frames, and Jean knows the tastes of charring flesh.

_“If I’d known it would be this hellish, I would never have chosen to be a solider.”_

Jean feels the cool of slate flagstone beneath his calves as he kneels, and yet the blaze of fire is hot – almost unbearably – against his face. He wonders if it might strip the skin from his cheeks if he stares too long and wallows too much. Maybe that would be better. (But he doesn’t know why it would be better.)

Charred and shattered bones litter the cobbles, painted black with soot and crumbling when Jean’s fingers brush them, his knuckles finding their texture rough and haggard. He curls his palm around the fragments of what might have once been a femur, or perhaps a tibia, or even a rib – the truth is: it’s too desecrated for him to ever tell. The bone shards stain his hand black.

_“I can’t even tell which bones are yours anymore.”_

Jean curls his fingers tight around the remains of a pulverised hope, and brings his fist to his chest. He knows he’s dreaming – somehow, he always knows – and yet the shaking that racks his body seems so real, and every spasm of muscle is like a sprain, like a break, and _God_ , does it hurt.

The pyre dissolves into black light, naught but a speck of orbous yellow in a distance Jean cannot grasp. He reaches into the dark, hands scrabbling at nothing and nowhere, rumbling through a space that holds no transient point for his eyes to fix upon. It feels like falling without the rush of air past his ears and without the weightlessness, for he still feels so heavy and so tired within his chest and it drags him down.

From out of the dark come hands – strong and lean, and freckled like constellations that have been sucked from the blackness and painted instead onto skin as star-spangled flecks. The hands find Jean hands, and they cup them between warm palms. He feels lips against his knuckles and he wants to cry out. He wants to know the freckled man’s name – because he must be important, he must be the missing bolt in all of this that Jean needs to find before he collapses in on himself in a fit of gears and unoiled machinery – so that he can find him.

He needs to find him. There’s no question of wanting now. It’s desperation, and it all but _chokes_ him like wires about his neck.

 

* * *

 

Jean is well acquainted with his ceiling – and all the damp that seeps through from the floor above – before he dares to move himself from his bed the following morning.

And the morning after, and the morning after that, and after that – and so on and so forth until he’s not quite sure when he sleeps and when he wakes, because the sun never seems to be in the right place beyond the flimsy veil of his cheap curtains.

He still has no name. There is no stretch of syllables that sits poignantly on the tip of his tongue, no name that rings any bells when he switches on the television or opens up the newspaper stuffed crudely into his foyer mail box.

He must be out there. The man with the freckles. Jean has found everyone else: the Commander, and the Captain, and even Squad Leader Hanji, who he recognised on a documentary that glazed his TV screen in the early hours of a morning about a week ago. Ymir was the name of the running woman, and Annie the barista at Starbucks. Reiner and Bertholdt in the cinema, and Historia was the theatre girl who called herself Christa. Armin in the library, and Eren with the guitar, and Mikasa at the grocery store.

Connie in the coffee shop, and Sasha with a tissue in her hands.

He’s found them all, save one. Just one. The man with the freckles is the very last, and yet he has evaded capture.

Jean wonders if he has been lucky so far. He has been the centre, the gravitational pull that has guided everyone he needs and knows to _his_ city, of all the places in the world. Maybe the freckled man is stronger than his magnetism – maybe he knows that Jean is truly weak behind the walls he has erected all his life. Maybe he wanders worlds and streets away, clueless and unassuming of the way Jean craves for him, even if Jean does not know his name, and merely the way his lips feel in places where Jean has rarely let anyone touch before.

There’s one other thing that Jean is curious about – if curiosity manifests itself in nausea and spinning vision and too many dashes to the toilet basin with his tail between his legs and a wrangling threatening to rip apart his gut – and it’s whether or not this blasted sickness might finally pass should he find the freckled man. His cure? Jean doesn’t know, but he would give almost anything for the feeling of walking on solid land again. He has been at sea for far too long, and he fears his blood may have become brine in all these long months that have swept him from side to side like an unforgiving riptide.

Jean wants to know if he’s destined to live like this for the rest of his life. He wants to know if the floating is permanent; if the listless feeling of being a spectre to the world he thought was more home than it is will prevail until he’s old and decrepit.

He wants to know _why now_. What had pulled the thorn from his side and unplugged the flow of memories – repressed for a reason, he can only conclude. He’s not surprised. Why would someone want to remember the splatter of bloody gruel across the walls of the home once grown up in, and how it sounds to hear friends and loved ones ripped apart before the eyes?

Maybe Mikasa was right. Maybe he should go and see a therapist. Maybe he should ask what pills he might be able to take to suffocate and drown it in the deep.

Jean never asked for this. He just wants to live a normal life. He has no gift for being extraordinary.

 

* * *

 

It’s been a year since Jean cried in front of Sasha. Three-hundred and sixty-five days of his tutors asking him why he’s so quiet in class and never raises his hand. All too many months of Mikasa watching him sympathetically from across the table when they meet for coffee, and trying to be subtle in pushing business card after business card towards Jean, the words: “just give it a chance” dying on her lips. Far too often ignoring phone calls from his mother and the voicemails left on his cell asking – with disappointment evident – why Jean hadn’t come home for so long.

Jean knows why. He feels tied to this city, all chains and anchors and tethers of both his own volition and not at all. He doesn’t feel like he can _go home_ , not when he stands amid a breeding ground of lost and scattered souls that have maybe spent centuries searching for retribution – and he himself in the séance that has finally united them.

Jean still lives in hope. He hopes that if he lingers, he might catch the straggler who has not caught up with all of them yet. Who hasn’t caught up with _him_.

He feels he has to wait. (Or lest he whittle away with the way the sickness sometimes stop him from leaving his apartment for days at a time.) (At least Mikasa and the others have taken to bringing him food parcels and alcohol on those down and dirty days.)

“You should get out more,” Eren shrugs on one of those evenings – an evening of wallowing grey feelings and the notion of not quite belonging or believing in the contents of his apartment. “No wonder you’re feeling so shitty if you never see the light of day.”

“ _Eren_ ,” Mikasa scolds with a hiss, “That’s enough. It’s none of your business.” Jean can’t help but cringe, curling his fingers around the glass of water that Mikasa has planted squarely in front of him with the instruction to drink. He swirls the contents around and it splatters up the sides of the glass in a shallow vortex. Jean knows the feeling.

“Well, it’s none of your business either,” Eren pouts, folding his arms petulantly across his chest. “And Jean doesn’t seem to want to make it his _own_ business either, so someone has to smack him straight now and again.”

Mikasa purses her lips, but she has nothing to say to that. Jean’s not surprised. Eren’s got a point: he’s been coping by refusing to deal with any it – if that can be called _coping_ at all. Letting it run its course seems the option with the least effort required on his part. He is just so God damn _tired_.

“How ‘bout we go get a couple drinks?” Connie pipes up around the lit cigarette bobbing between his lips. The luminescent ash crumbles to the table top – it will probably scorch the wood. Jean doesn’t have him in it to care. “Friend from the theatre department is having a small get together at her place tonight. Thought we could go. It’ll be chill.”

Mikasa’s thin eyebrows furrow and she turns to look at Jean as she addresses Connie.

“How many people would be there?”

“Not many,” Connie shrugs, “Christa only has, like, a small place. It won’t be packed.”

“Con and me were thinking of putting in an appearance anyway,” Sasha adds, “What’s the difference between one plus-one, and four, huh? Anyway, it’s been a freaking _age_ since we did anything except drink around Jean’s kitchen table.”

Mikasa covers Jean’s hand with her white one, squeezing his fingers to draw his attention to her eyes.

“Jean?”

“Yeah,” Jean murmurs, his heart distant and a drone in his lungs, “Yeah, cool. Would be good to get out.”

 

* * *

 

Jean drinks a lot. It’s easier than dealing with the flare of people lighting cigarettes, the flicker of their lighters too bright and the smell of smoke too coarse for Jean to sugar coat as _not wood smoke._

He drinks until the music becomes a blur – and whatever it is must be pleasant, because his leg jitters and his fingers tap on the side of his beer can, the sound tinny and metallic – and the ache is numbed.

It’s wrong of him to call it a pain, because it has never quite stretched that far – not to actually making him double-up on himself and _want_ to cry – but an _ache_ seems an adequate description. An ache suggests longing. Wanting. The need to fill the hole in his chest all the way to the top until it brims and overflows and saturates him with _too much_ , because it’s been a year of, somehow, _not enough_.

He doesn’t have to remember the missing piece of the puzzle when his brain is fogged up with beer. He doesn’t have to dwell endlessly on the hard truth that he’s the _only_ one who remembers. He just gets to be.

 _Being_ is nice. It’s uncomplicated. Normalcy is a craving.

He drinks until Christa is not a problem, and she becomes just another person who has unwittingly been drawn to Jean across spans of time and space, like the rest. He drinks until he can ignore the freckled woman – _shouldn’t she be wearing sneakers and running gear?_ – who clings to Christa like a limpet, pressing open mouthed kisses into her neck whilst she giggles; he drinks until it doesn’t matter that the man throwing Connie beer after beer is tall, and burly, and awfully familiar.

Jean doesn’t need to care – and it’s a God damn _tragedy_ that this is the only way he can escape.

The beer is a little warm and perambulates too bitterly in his throat for him to enjoy the taste, but the couch he has been pushed down onto by Mikasa is comfortable, and he enjoys the smell of her floral shampoo as she squishes up next to him. He can hear the country drawl of Eren’s guitar nearby – because of course he’s precocious enough to bring that thing to someone else’s house party – and he feels Sasha’s hand on his knee whenever she laughs too honestly at some joke Jean is too switched-off to hear.

The chatter around him is like white-noise: beautiful white-noise that sounds much like rain on the sidewalk, save louder and bolder and more invasive – and Jean likes invasive. He likes the snippets of conversation that swirl like driftwood caught in a whirlpool within his head, everything so inconsequential and yet so beautiful for that very same reason. His head begins to spin, and he feels the back of a hand pressed to his forehead.

“You’re warm,” comes Mikasa’s voice, a delicate puff of her breath against Jean’s throat as he lolls his head back against the spine of the couch. “Maybe you should take some fresh air. Do you want be to go with you?”

Jean shakes his head and waves her away with a clumsy hand.

“Nah. Nah, I’m fine. Can go— by myself.”

 

* * *

 

It’s cold outside. Fucking _freezing_. But it’s what jean gets for agreeing to go to a house party in the middle of winter.

He tugs his Letterman jacket tighter across his chest, shoving his hands beneath his arm pits in the hope he won’t have to add frostbite to his every present list of problems. He curses the fact he didn’t shell out for a better-quality jacket in the Thanksgiving sales last semester. He really regrets it now.

Christa’s porch is gloomy, the weathered wood of the decking having seen far better days than the unforgiving January is offering. A single light above the front door splays the wood with a grimy sort of yellow light, around which bugs flitter and buzz, electrocuting themselves with a _fizt_ when they dare too close.

Jean is alone, but he feels light-headed, his cheeks and forehead too warm to have him running back inside out of his own fear being by himself. He curls himself onto the doorsteps, drawing his legs to his chest and resting his chin atop his knees, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the poor light. He decides it can’t hurt to cool down for a bit – he doesn’t want to make a fool of himself by puking it up in some stranger’s toilet.

The music slows down – piano and guitar become more distinguishable to his ears than softcore dubstep and heavy synthesisers. Someone yells at Eren to _stop playing his fucking guitar_. Jean hears Eren yell back, and then a raucous cheer erupt after something clatters brassily to the floor.

Jean licks his lips, sticky with beer and chapped by the unforgiving cold. He’s not a fan of the way the stale taste of alcohol mingles with the ferrous tang of blood from a crack in his skin. He’s once again less able to forget.

The front door creaks open behind him – Jean can’t help but sway backwards, the hard wood no longer propping him upright. He grunts loudly.

“O-oh, sorry,” comes a voice, muffled by the music that pours from the house through the crack in the door. “I didn’t know anyone was out here.”

“’S just me,” Jean mutters, scooting to the side as the stranger hops over the doorstep and pulls the handle behind him. Eren’s shouting is muted again. “You’re not lighting up, are you?”

“N… no,” the stranger says. Jean thinks he imagines the waver in the man’s voice. “N-no, I … I don’t like the smell of smoke.”

Jean is surprised by the way his lips quirk up at the notion. He stretches out his legs across the porch, scraping his heels on the dirty wood as he feels his muscles groan for being coiled up so stiffly.

“Funny,” Jean scoffs, sparing a glance up at the stranger, “I’m exactly the—”

He stops. The words not only die on his lips, but they disintegrate. They become ash and dust in his lungs, only to be kicked up by the _hurricane_ that rattles through his coherence.

The murky light illuminates a field of freckles upon the cheekbones of the stranger. Jean flat lines.

“Exactly the same?” the stranger complies gently, “Everyone always looks at me funny when I can’t explain why. It just seems intrinsic to me. Do … do you mind if I join you?”

Jean thinks he nods. He’s not entirely sure. The stranger smiles, a lop-sided twitch of his lips that has Jean swept out to sea.

It is him. It’s the man. It’s the one he’s been waiting for.

And Jean doesn’t know anything but drowning.

The man squats down on the door step and mimics Jean’s posture, stretching his long legs out beside Jean’s own. His hands rest on his lap. Jean can’t help but look – no, it’s not looking – Jean _stares_.

He shouldn’t know what it feels like to have those hands on his thighs or in his hair, but he does. They are the same hands he has dreamt about for months now.

Jean can feel heat pricking in the corners of his eyes – but this is the first time that he’s felt the closing of his throat to go with it. This is the first time he’s felt the need to actually cry.

He doesn’t. He can’t risk scaring the man away. He swallows it back and presents a stiff upper lip, masking his heavy sniff as the hanging-on of a winter cold.

The man has noticed Jean staring at his hands.

“The … the freckles are on my father’s side,” he says quietly, running the fingertips of one hand over the knuckles of the other, swiping his thumb across the starfleet of brown freckles self-consciously. “My siblings didn’t get them, though. Just me.”

Jean feels his jaw clench.

“They’re nice,” he says. “I … I like them.”

The man smiles – and it makes Jean giddy with the way he bites into his lower lip and dimples form at the corners of his mouth. The bashfulness suits him – but Jean knows that already, of course.

“Maybe you should give me … give me your name before you start hitting on me,” the man chuckles breathily. There’s vodka on his words, but it’s not like Jean needs any more fuel for the gasoline fire searing up his veins towards that precariously-placed dynamite.

He doesn’t want it to explode before he has a chance, and so his words fall out of him unpractised and uncared for, and tearfully desperate.

“Jean,” he breathes, “My name … it’s Jean.”

The man seems to mull it over, his mouth moving slowly as his tests the syllable of Jean’s name and rounds out the vowels on his tongue, inaudibly. Jean can’t tear his eyes away. He has no shame.

“Jean,” he repeats softly, “That’s a good name. I had a … _friend_ , once, called Jean.”

Jean remembers hands, lips, whispers in the dark. The ache is now _very much_ a pain.

“And yours?” Jean croaks out, “What’s yours?”

He almost doesn’t want to know. Maybe it’s all a dream within a dream. Maybe his curse has finally spread its wings and become a fully-fledged torture.

The man almost seems sorrowful when he speaks. Wistful, with the tremble that Jean imagines in his noble jaw.

“It’s Marco.”

Marco. _Marco_. It’s no revelation, for Jean’s really known it all along, buried somewhere deep. It is little more than a gap finally being filled in.

Jean nods to himself, pressing his palms into his thighs and squeezing at his lean skin through his jeans. He doesn’t want to cry, but it feels like a sob might erupt from his tin-soldier’s chest at any moment.

“Marco,” he says, the breath a dry chuckle chapping his lips, “Yeah, I … I also had a friend called that once.”

The man – _Marco_ – fixes his molasses-brown gaze upon the side of Jean’s face. It’s earthy – no fire to burn Jean, and no water to drown him – and it’s _longing_. Jean can blame it on the alcohol.

“What happened to him?” Marco whispers.

“He died,” Jean murmurs, “And burned.”

Jean wants to look. He wants to turn his head and meet the burdening gaze of the man probably a little too drunk for his own good, fuelling Jean with some devilish hope that he cannot bring himself to believe – because it will break him, if he hasn’t already broken. If he looks the man in his eyes, he’ll do something stupid.

If he looks Marco in the eyes, he’ll have to be more than just another lost piece – and there’s no way Jean can ask that of a stranger.

Jean doesn’t look. He slides his knees up to his chest again and buries his face in the stiff denim. His face feels hot – and wet – but there’s no-one to hand him a tissue this time.

It’s overwhelming. Like all the sadness that he had _expected_ to feel all the times before has been saved up and amassed for this— for _this_ moment.  And it’s not just sadness – it’s anger too, and fear, and regret, and unbridled _joy_ , and he can’t even begin to describe the spirals and spirals, because it’s too much. _Too much_.

_So this is what it feels like to overflow._

Marco smells of pine and cigarette smoke, despite everything. Jean wonders if it’s supposed to be a great irony, or just a cruel coincidence.

No matter. Salt water bares no heed, and rolls freely down Jean’s cheeks. It soaks through his jeans.

“’M sorry,” Jean croaks. Is he apologising to Marco, or to himself? He can’t say he knows for certain. “’M sorry, I just— I just had a rough night. I don’t wanna—”

He doesn’t want to scare him away.

Jean is not awarded silence for his toil. The house vibrates with lively chatter and thumping bass that does not have a care in the world for the way Jean wishes to dissolve on the front porch and be done with it all. Traffic rumbles in the city: cars purring, sirens shrilling like birds calling for the dawn, tires grumbling on pot-holed tarmac. The wood of the decking creaks beneath Marco’s weight as he shifts closer to Jean on the doorstep.

Jean feels Marco’s hand in the small of his back.

No, he doesn’t just _feel_ it. It’s more than that. He dreams it. He believes it. It’s all one and the same now. It’s warm, soft. Jean knows intimately the way Marco’s strong fingers caress the base of his spine with a gossamer touch.

His own whimper is just as delicate. He turns his head, resting his ear on his knees, and looks up at Marco, knowing his own gaze must be watery. Marco’s eyebrows are pulled up in the centre, a deep crevice of concern excavated in the centre of his brow. His freckles are like stardust. He is just like Jean remembers him to be.

 _I know you, I know you_ , Jean wants to wail and to whisper. He wants to know if he still feels a tingle in his right arm when it rains. He wants to know if he imagines phantom leather cutting into his thighs like straps bound to tight. He wants to kiss him and taste vodka and the wood smoke that has lingered for centuries too long. The thought of it makes him quiver.

Someone speaks. They are both too drunk to know which of them it is.

“Please tell me that you remember me.”


End file.
